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Graphic Truth: Will this year's wildfires scorch records?
Wildfires are burning across Western Canada, causing smoke to drift over Montana, Colorado, Kansas, Wisconsin, and other parts of the Midwest.
If you’re having a flashback to the amber smoke that cloaked cities across Canada and the US last summer, you’re not alone. That’s why we decided to look at how this year’s wildfire season compares to last year’s.
This year, Canada’s nearly 3,917 blazes have already burned more than 2.7 million hectares, with about 852 active wildfires as of the end of July. The good news? It’s considerably less land than had been scorched by the end of July 2023.
While that may paint the picture that the 2024 wildfire season will be less severe than the historic 2023 season, this year’s blazes may just be off to a slow start. Experts have warned that last year’s warm fall and winter, along with droughts and minimal snowfall, could potentially lead the 2024 fire season to be even worse than last year.
Five-alarm fire: Why Canada’s wildfire season could scorch last year's record
Remember last summer, when New York’s skyline glowed orange – looking apocalyptic – thanks to Canadian wildfires? Last year, between May and October, some 6,500 fires burned nearly 46 million acres of Canada’s land, the worst year on record. The blazes sent toxic smoke throughout much of the country and down into the United States as far south as Florida, at one point leaving New York City with the worst air quality in the world.
And now, this year’s wildfire season looks like it may scorch last year’s record.
Earlier this week, the first significant wildfires of the year led to evacuation alerts in British Columbia and Alberta, including for Fort McMurray, where a 2016 wildfire became Canada’s most expensive natural disaster ever. Smoke from the fires led to airquality alerts in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota – and left Kansas City with the worst air quality in the country – giving US cities a hazy preview of the summer ahead.
Perfect conditions for disaster
On Monday, over 500,000 acres had burned already in Canada, a fast and heavy start to the season. As of Wednesday, roughly 1,000 fires were burning. Earlier in the spring, experts warned that hot and dry conditions in this El Nińo year would lead to more – and more severe – fires. In April, Emergency Preparedness Minister Harjit Sajjan said “We can expect that the wildfire season will start sooner, end later, and potentially be more explosive.” That warning has come to pass.
The burst of fires is largely thanks to zombie fires – blazes that survived the winter and continued to burn beneath the snow. Now, with snow melting and hot, dry conditions in place, the smoldering blazes are springing back to life. So the 2024 fires are a kind of perpetual inferno set to disrupt the summer on both sides of the border and cost both countries billions of dollars fighting the fires, replacing or reinforcing infrastructure, and dealing with insurance claims. The 2023 fires cost insurers in British Columbia alone over $720 million.
The current US wildfire outlook is better than Canada’s, but there are exceptions. The National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook for May noted “Year-to-date annual acres burned for the US is well above the 10-year average at 240% of normal,” though that surge was caused by major fires in Texas and Oklahoma last February. “[T]he national year-to-date tally of wildfires remains below average, near 76%,” the report notes.
The outlook for May to July stateside also warns of bigger threats to a handful of regions, including the Midwest, Southwest, and Hawaii. The threat of serious fires in Hawaii recalls the devastating 2023 Lahaina fire, the fifth deadliest in the country’s history.
Wildfires have long existed, but their scale and number, and the destruction they bring, are getting worse. Climate change is exacerbating fires, making them more likely to burn and harder to fight during increasingly long seasons. It’s a devastating new normal, which raises the question of what Canada and the US are doing to respond and how they’re cooperating to tackle a threat that doesn’t respect national borders.
Spending big on fighting fires – and sharing resources
On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced $250 million in funding for 158 projects across 31 states aimed at developing wildfire protection plans in at-risk communities under the Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program. Over five years, the plan is worth $1 billion alongside another $3.5 billion dedicated to wildfire management.
Kim Christensen, fire and aviation management deputy assistant director for operations with the US Forest Service, says her agency aims to have 11,300 wildland firefighters on the job before the peak of fire season. She notes that between the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, there are 16,700 firefighters – plus assistance from partners across local, state, and international sources, including Canada. Altogether, that’s over 32,000 personnel at the ready.
Canada, meanwhile, has invested nearly $800 million in wildfire management initiatives, such as procuring equipment and training 1,000 new firefighters nationwide. It reportedly has 5,500 wildland firefighters, excluding the remote Yukon region, plus volunteer forces.
Plans and agreements between the US and Canada for tackling wildfires are growing, too. Last year, the two countries established a framework for exchanging resources to fight fires and sharing information after decades of ad hoc cooperation. The move is the formalization and extension of a long-established relationship, which indicates just how serious the growing challenge is.
“The US and Canada provide fire suppression assistance to each other practically every year through these arrangements,” Christensen says. She points out that “Several states in the northern tier of the US also have compact arrangements with Canadian Provinces that enable them to obtain fire suppression assistance from each other.”
These agreements include the Canada/United States Reciprocal Forest Fire Fighting Arrangement, through which the two countries coordinate resource sharing. Alexandria Jones, acting communications manager with the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, echoes the deep ties between the two countries. She says that under the arrangement, the US sent 2,450 personnel north “to assist with our record-breaking fire season” last year.
Last week, Public Safety Canada announced another $1.2 million for CIFFC “to expand the Centre’s wildfire prevention and mitigation capacity” and a pilot program for building NGOs’ ability to respond to disasters. The government also announced $57.2 million for the country’s FireSmart program to assist Indigenous communities that face wildland fire threats. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson notes this money is on top of the hundreds of millions already spent since 2019 on training more firefighters.
Federal efforts and international assistance are part of a disaster response package that includes provincial, state, and local efforts. Alberta, for instance, has a $2 billion emergency contingency fund for wildfire and drought, and BC is making its way through 31 recommendations from its recent Expert Task Force on Emergencies.
Does Canada need a FEMA?
All of this amounts to a lot of cooperation and coordination, which is tricky work, especially as Canada faces a wildfire severity forecast that is above average or well above average for the next five months coupled with ongoing drought in the West that could make for another devastating wildfire season.
Last year, Canada said it was considering creating a national emergency response agency like the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the wildfire season devastated much of the country, but nothing has yet come from the idea. In February, disaster and emergency expert Jack Lindsay argued that the country “needs to dramatically update how it prepares for and manages emergencies.” But as the 2024 fires arrive, Canadians are still waiting on those plans.
The way things stand, the 2024 wildfire season is set to be a brutal one for both countries. The impact of Canadian fires will once again be felt stateside. As the two countries continue to spend, develop programs, and share resources to battle the blazes, the scale of the fires continues to grow, stretching resources thin while raising coordination and deployment challenges. Both the US and Canada say they’re up to the task, but evacuation alerts and air quality warnings aren’t going away anytime soon.
Graphic Truth: Canada braces for wildfire season
As the weather warms, the US and Canada are bracing for the potential of another record-breaking wildfire season. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive on record, with more than 6,000 fires tearing through tens of millions of acres and blanketing the US East Coast and Midwest in smoke.
Meanwhile, the US saw the smallest number of acres burned in more than two decades last year, thanks tohigh levels of precipitation and snowfall, which kept the West mostly out of trouble. But it also experienced its deadliest wildfire in over a century in Maui, Hawaii.
Canada's federal officials are warning that this season could be even worse. Warm fall and winter conditions, combined with droughts and next to no snowfall from December to February in essential areas like southern British Columbia and the Prairies impact soil moisture levels, raising the risk of fires.Graphic Truth: Home insurance costs are on the rise
From devastating hurricanes and ceaseless wildfires to catastrophic floods, natural disasters are increasing in frequency and cost in Canada and the US. As climate change makes disasters more frequent and destructive, insurers are having to raise rates and reduce coverage.
In the US, the home insurance industry has had three straight years of underwriting losses. Insurance rates rose an average of 21% in 2023 as a response, with some insurers in disaster-prone places like California and Florida ceasing to write new policies altogether. As a result, homeowners are forced to pay higher premiums for the fewer insurance options that remain.
In Canada, last summer’s record wildfires compounded with historic floods, costing more than $3.1 billion in insured damage and spiking rates in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
For this week’s Graphic Truth, we looked at how much insurance rates have risen around the US and Canada.
Are the US and Canada ready for wildfire season?
Last year marked the worst wildfire season ever recorded in Canada as 18.5 million hectares of land burned — shattering the previous record of 10 million hectares in 1989. Those fires accounted for 23% of global wildfire carbon emissions in 2023. They also sent toxic smoke throughout the country and into the US, putting the health and safety of Americans at risk.
At one point, New York City had the worst air quality in the world as Americans were exposed to more smoke per person than ever before. The smoke, which reached as far as Florida, also put US crops at risk.
This year might be as bad — or worse — which means that domestic and cross-border policies for fighting fires will be more important than ever.
An early start to the wildfire season. Last week, Alberta declared an early start to the wildfire season. Dry conditions and warm weather brought about the premature arrival – roughly ten days ahead of the typical season. This comes as the province faces water shortages and prepares for a severe drought atop predictions of a dangerous fire season for the province.
Meanwhile, zombie fires continue to burn both there and in British Columbia — more than 150 of them never went out last year and managed to stay alight throughout the winter. Experts say the scale of the problem is unprecedented.
South of the border, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillendeclared a state disaster on Monday as wildfires threatened residents near North Platte, mobilizing the National Guard to fight the blazes. Compared to Canada, the US wildfire season in 2023 was modest, but experts warned the calm could be atypical.
The year is barely underway and the US has already witnessed a record-setting fire. Texas on Thursday was battling the second-largest wildfire in US history and the largest, most destructive fire in the state’s history. The deadly, vast blaze, which began on Monday, has since spread across over one million acres.
Worse years to come. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires as the same hot, dry conditions that have started the season early in Alberta make them more likely to start and harder to fight year after year. The coming seasons will approach or break records, with the US set to face the effects from both domestic wildfires and Canadian counterparts. In 2023, summer warnings pointed to a heavy year for both countries as “unprecedented” fires raged and spewed smoke across the border.
In January, observers were already worrying about the 2024 fire season in Canada, citing a combination of climate change and the El Niño effect, which will produce conditions favorable for wildfires. Last year was the hottest on record for the world, and as routinely warmer years are set to be the norm experts are calling for proactive, cooperative policy responses across borders.
Cross-border cooperation remains resilient. For years, Canada and the US have managed to cooperate on shared concerns — even during times of political challenges.
“Regardless of the politics, cross-border cooperation between provinces and states, and between agencies and departments of both federal governments, is good and seamless regardless of the political leaders in power," says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice.
The cooperation, Thompson says, is thanks to a “seamless and well-rehearsed order of operations.” The two countries even managed to keep that cooperation up and running during the Trump years, which were, to say the least, fraught.
Recently, the need for cross-border efforts to manage disasters has grown. As the fires raged and smoke blanked much of the continent last summer, Natural Resources Canada and the US Departments of the Interior and Agriculture signed a memo of understanding committing them to enhanced cooperation in fighting wildfires. They pledged to focus on building out a framework for mutual assistance, cooperation, and procedures for resource sharing. That work is ongoing.
A few weeks earlier, in an interview with the CBC, Canada’s then-minister of public safety and emergency preparedness Bill Blair said he’d spoken with the head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) about better cooperation between the two countries, including the potential for “a NORAD-like approach,” noting that emergencies including floods, earthquakes, and wildfires were “borderless.”
At the same time, Canada — which doesn’t have a central, national disaster management agency — was also considering creating its own version of FEMA. Since then, discussion of those options has fallen off the radar (sure to return before long), but the US and Canada are nonetheless prepared to cooperate across the border to fight fires in 2024, guided by the Arrangement on Mutual Assistance in Fighting Forest Fires.
Gordon Sachs of the US Forest Service says the arrangement is “fully in place” and “has no end date.” The origins of the deal, which allows the US and Canada to share expertise and operations capacities to fight fires, stretches back to 1982. Sachs points out that since the 1980s, Canada and the US have provided fire fighting resources to one another in 37 of 40 years.
The newly-enhanced arrangement will take things further. Sachs says the 2023 renewal “goes beyond fire suppression to include training, research, and post-fire activities such as rehabilitation and restoration of burned areas.”
Whatever the 2024 fire season brings, US-Canadian cooperation on disasters, including wildfires, will likely increase in years to come. Climate change is already exacerbating natural disasters and their effects, many of which, as Blair noted, are borderless. Changes in the US administration in 2024 could prove a challenge at the worst possible time, but if past is prologue, there’s reason to believe cross-border cooperation on disaster responses will remain reliable.
Women take part in a ritual event of naked festival, for the first time in its 1250 years of history, at Owari Okunitama Shrine, also known as Konomiya Shrine, in Inazawa, Aichi Prefecture, central Japan February 22, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Japanese women go to naked party, Australian fires rage, French farmers fume, and Zambian creditors get paid.
1250:Washoi! Women crashed the party at Japan's 1250-year-old Naked Festival, a traditionally all-male event designed to drive out evil spirits. While they didn’t actually bare all, the first-ever female participants successfully trampled gender norms while ensuring that the festival continues as Japan’s population ages.
2000: Wildfires have forced more than 2,000 people to flee towns in western Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged all necessary assistance to combat the blazes, which are being exacerbated by an El Niño weather pattern known to fuel fires, cyclones and droughts.
1 : Angry French farmers delayed the opening of a major Paris farm fair by one hour, protesting costs, bureaucracy, and environmental regulations. Amid calls for his resignation, President Emmanuel Macron promised to meet with union representatives and stakeholders. European governments are concerned that the farm lobby could feed gains by the far right in European Parliament elections this June.
13 billion: Zambia’s 13bn mountain of debt is a little lighter today, thanks to deals struck with creditors China and India. It’s welcome news as the African nation contends with past defaults, depreciation of the kwacha, a revival of inflation, and a drought that was “one of the worst in living memory.” Zambia now plans to resume talks with private creditors and is back on track for a 1.3 billion bailout by the IMF.FILE PHOTO: A volunteer stirring food to be distributed to people in Omdurman, Sudan, September 3, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Crisis deepens in Sudan, Infernos rage in Chile, Moon is shrinking, Japan welcomes digital nomads, NJ scores World Cup final, Swift's lucky numbers
8,000,000: The United Nations reported this week that 10 months of violent conflict in Sudan have displaced nearly 8 million people and caused at least 12,000 deaths. The war between the rebel Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Army has left nearly half of Sudan's population in need of aid and the International Criminal Court investigating allegations of war crimes.
112: At least 112 people are dead and 190 missing in wildfires consuming the central regions of Chile, including the historic port city of Valparaiso. Arson is suspected to have ignited the blaze that burned over 106,255 acres during the intense heatwave sweeping South America.
150: Over millions of years, the moon has shrunk by 150 feet in diameter – and now, scientists are growing concerned. The shrinking, caused by the cooling of the moon's molten core, has led to the formation of thrust faults and “moonquakes” that could pose risks to future lunar missions, notably at its south pole.
10,000,000: If you’ve got a yen to work in Japan, this is your lucky day. To boost tourism, the country will be offering a “specified activities” visa to digital nomads from 49 countries and territories, including the self-employed. This will allow them to work remotely and stay for up to six months as long as they earn an annual income of 10 million yen, or $68,300. The program is expected to start in late March.
39: FIFA World Cup released the schedule and locations of games for the 2026 tournament, which will be played in Mexico, the US, and Canada. At 39 days, it will be the longest World Cup in history, culminating with a final to be played in “New York/New Jersey” (which means MetLife stadium in … New Jersey). Among other curiosities, close observers noted that there’s a chance of a knockout round match between the US and England on July 4 in Philadelphia. Get your 1776 on …
4: Last night, Taylor Swift became the first artist to win four Grammy awards for album of the year with "Midnights." The pop star, who now has 14 statues on the mantle, thanked her fans by announcing that her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” will drop on April 19. And for those wondering where she will be on Feb. 11, the Embassy of Japan in Washington, DC, tweeted on Friday that the singing superstar can “comfortably” get from her concert in Tokyo on Saturday to Las Vegas on Sunday in time to see her “guy on the Chiefs” play in the Super Bowl.
10 images that captured 2023
With 2023 in our rearview mirror, here are some of the images that defined the tumultuous year: from Fulton County, Georgia to Gaza City,
Feb. 5: Spy Balloon Downed
Credit: Sipa USA via Reuters
Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 recover a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 5, 2023.
Feb. 10: Earthquake shakes Turkey and Syria
Credit: Umit Bektas/Reuters
An aerial view shows damaged and collapsed buildings in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Hatay, Turkey February 10, 2023.
March 23: France protests pension changes
Credit: Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Reuters
Riot policemen stands amid clouds of tear gas as more than 70,000 people protest in Toulouse against French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise the national retirement age and change pension benefits. March 23th 2023.
May 6: King Charles III coronated
Credit: Stefan Rousseau/Pool via REUTERS
King Charles III waves as he leaves the balcony of Buckingham Palace, London, following his coronation, May 6, 2023.
Jun. 7: Canadian wildfires
Credit: REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
People ride bicycles at 6th Avenue as haze and smoke caused by wildfires in Canada blanket New York City, New York, U.S., June 7, 2023.
Aug. 24: Trump mugshot
Credit: Reuters
Former U.S. President Donald Trump in a police booking mugshot released by the Fulton County Sheriff's Office, August 24, 2023.
Sept. 25: Milei’s chainsaw
Credit: REUTERS/Cristina Sille
Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei holds a chainsaw next to Carolina Piparo, candidate for Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, during a campaign rally, in Buenos Aires, Argentina September 25, 2023.
Oct. 7: Noa Argamani kidnapped
Nova music festival attendee Noa Argamani reaches out to her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, as they are kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023.
Oct. 9: Gaza’s children bombed
Credit: IMAGO/Medhat Hajjaj/apaimages via Reuters
A child at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City rests after surgery, having been wounded in an Israeli attack. October 9, 2023.
Oct 23: Afghanistan's historic Cricket World Cup win
Credit: ANI via Reuters
Hashmatullah Shahidi celebrates Afghanistan's victory against Pakistan. Oct 23, 2023
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